Are we there yet?

About 18 months ago we published “MarvinSketch: on the way towards publication quality drawing”. Although the blog post was the trailing subsequence of the newly introduced label editor, the work has been started way before that and as you would expect it is going ever since. Now we believe the time is right to review the above statement and briefly summarise where we are.

Since early 2015 MarvinSketch has grown with many cool features to support the creation of beautiful and high class chemical structures to be used in publications describing cutting edge research in field of chemistry. So, let’s see, in no particular order, what we have done. We’ve added many journal styles into our document styling list. Although the list is far from complete, arguably it includes several of the most acknowledged international chemistry journals. In the meantime we’ve also given full access to users to edit bonds and atoms according to their taste as well as to follow the requirements, should they be internal or external. Furthermore, extending our template library has always been a priority and is still an ongoing project. New structures are constantly being added, and the list includes now some organometallic compounds and basic fullerenes as well. You tell us what you are still missing! The recently released grid & guidelines together with the arsenal of alignment and distribution functions are told to be very useful features guiding the creators in positioning their molecules in a nice and accurate fashion. We have added IUPAC conform label rendering, completely revised our reaction drawing. Finally, I want to mention the most recent feature of such, the Analysis Box. This element makes it possible to set your structures with live and relevant chemical information when needed, appearing next to the associated entities in your publication.

When you are challenging your mind with putting together the bits and pieces of information that finally and hopefully will come together in a “high-quality publication” all these above mentioned are expected to be in place and working seamlessly, unquestionably and in the easiest possible way. This has always been in our focus driving our development teams, and we do whatever it takes to let you fully concentrate on scientific questions, rather than that of drawing issues. The good thing is that our effort is being proven every day by our much valued user community publishing loads of papers on an extremely diverse selection of research topics, including early phase drug discovery, catalyst design for oil and gas processes, renewable energy sources, green chemistry applications, just to name a few. And we greatly appreciate that. We think we are on the right way, but it is up to you to decide if we are there yet, or how far we still need to travel on this road. So, don’t be shy and let us know - leave your comment in this blog post.